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That all of the following tales are likely apocryphal doesn't lessen our enjoyment of them. It's a rare traveler indeed who hasn't encountered some haughty fellow passenger with an inflated sense of entitlement who thinks his every desire should be accommodated (no matter how unreasonable that desire might be), and it's an even rarer individual who hasn't been seated on a flight next to someone he'd like to see sucked out the window: Examples: At different times various form of the obnoxious passenger legend represented above are circulated anew with their details altered. For instance, the story we recorded in 1998 about the racist white woman on the British Airways flights out of Johannesburg who refused to be seated next to a black passenger came back for another round in 2004, that time purporting to be about a white woman on a flight between Saskatoon and Calgary. In 2005 it was told of a well-to-do woman seated next to a yarmulka-wearing Jew on a flight out of Atlanta. In January 2012 the story was spread via Facebook, that time about a 50-something year old white woman traveling on TAM Airlines (a Brazilian air carrier). More recent versions feature a Muslim passenger who is offended at being seated next to a Bible-reading woman. We'd like to believe virtue will be rewarded, hence legends such as the ones recounted above help us to set the world to rights. Even if they never happened, we'd like to think they did, and we gain a measure of comfort from them because they reassure us that somewhere, maybe if only in the realm of legend, someone is standing up to bigots who feel entitled to special treatment over those whom they harbor prejudices against or regard as their social inferiors. Unfortunately, such legends, though they have their uses in helping us feel better about our world, can also prove damaging and hurtful by reinforcing stereotypes: Even though not all whites would disdain sitting next to blacks, nor Muslims next to Christians, members of those groups sometimes end up being unfairly tarred by the same brush. In 2001, Hubbard Foods of New Zealand, a company that produces breakfast cereal, erred by including the South African woman seated next to a black man legend as a travel story in a children's newsletter that was inserted into boxes of its product. The tale had been selected for inclusion as an uplifting story imbued with a moral message, and no one thought to check its accuracy. South Africans living in New Zealand were outraged by it, as they saw the leaflet as unfairly painting them as racist and furthering an apartheid-era stereotype that is no longer valid. Hubbard Foods apologized but claimed it was too late and far too expensive to withdraw the boxes from store shelves. Some variants of this legend type reference homosexuality rather than race or religion: Other versions of this legend type deal with obnoxious passengers being put in their places after displaying an exaggerated sense of self-importance due to their social status:
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